A fascinating article on David Shaw (aka Why David Shaw should be our next coach)

62 posts in this topic

The following article is taken from The MMQB. I know some of you guys hate Peter King, but honestly, this is one of the best articles that I've read in a long, long time. It focuses on David Shaw, and how he prepares/gameplans. David Shaw is the future of coaching, and I believe it would be wise for us to throw as much money as possible to get him to head east to Charlotte.

We’re living in a great time for offensive football. Here on the banks of the Hudson on a glorious Saturday for college football, one team, undermanned Army, ran the triple option, where the quarterback can hand to a big back, run himself or pitch to a trailer. The other team, Stanford, ran everything. Such as:

• A pro style shotgun, with one back, one tight end and three wideouts.

• A pro style I, with two backs, two wideouts and a tight end.

• An empty-backfield shotgun, with four wides and a tight end.

• A pistol (the shorter version of the shotgun) with sidecar backs on either side of quarterback Kevin Hogan and three wides.

• A pistol, with one back, two wides, and a tight end and slot tight end next to each other.

• A heavy formation, with three tight ends and two backs.

• The Weird Wildcat (my words, not Shaw’s): a back taking the snap, three tight ends, and a guard, 316-pound Joshua Garnett, as another (slot) tight end to demolish anything in his path.

• A classic old-time power I, with three backs and two tight ends. (Get the point? David Shaw loves the tight end.)

• And something I don’t know what to call: Before the snap, the tackle, tight end and slot tight end shifted to the right (sort of what Chip Kelly did at Washington in Week 1) to create a huge gap outside the guard.

“I’m going to quote my old boss, Jon Gruden,’’ Shaw said, standing in a tunnel outside the Stanford locker room after the 34-20 win over Army. Shaw was a Raiders quality control coach under Gruden for three years, and Rich Gannon’s quarterback coach in his fourth year with Gruden, 2001. “He would say it every single day: ‘What you want to do on offense is present the illusion of sophistication but all in all remain very simple and basic.’ So very often we’ll throw a whole bunch of different stuff at them, but we’re going to run a basic day-one installation play. Something we’ve run thousands of times. Something very, very simple. But for the defense, it looks very complicated. So we want to present these illusions, then run a regular play that we just want to execute right.’’

Shaw was happy to run some heavy-protection packages but still score out of them. Out of the power I with Hogan under center, Stanford sent only two receivers out on one play. Both backs simply acted as extra protection for Hogan, and, with eight kept in to block, the fleet Ty Montgomery beat double-coverage and caught a 46-yard touchdown pass in stride. Same thing later, with a little more illusion. Keeping seven in to block with Hogan in the pistol, Stanford had wideout Kelsey Young motion in from the right and follow running back Tyler Gaffney out of the backfield in a double-wheel-route concept up the left sideline. Army, confused, covered only one of them, and Gaffney caught an easy 23-yard touchdown.

On this day, the Cardinal ran 56 plays, and you never looked out on the field and said, “I’ve never seen that before.” (Well, the double-wheel thing maybe; that was unusual.) The formations and movement were offputting at times.

Basically, David Shaw is advancing offenses by keeping them as simple as possible, taking after Chip Kelly. Chip Kelly?! you say, well, yeah, it's addressed in the article. Shaw believes, as well as Kelly himself, that the offense they run in Philly is simple, but it is about illusions and misconceptions. They might run it faster than anyone else, but it's nothing that out of the ordinary.

Shaw also mentions that he has learned how to devise schemes from his old mentor, Jon Gruden.

Just take a minute and read it. If you don't come away thinking that David Shaw is the type of person we need for the future of Carolina, I don't think you have a pulse.